MR. K. FUELLER was a blue-level Geomancer with the characteristic air of a tenured civil servant. He knew who I was but barely looked up from the papers in front of him. The disrespect was deliberate, meant to provoke me. And yet he was terrified, if the sudden beads of sweat on his forehead were anything to go by.

  He cleared his throat. “Have you performed Magic since your last parole meeting?”

  “No.”

  “Have you interacted in any fashion with members of the Magical community, either to obtain or dispense learning?”

  “No.” My days of “obtaining” learning from another Mage were a thousand years in the past, and I will not take on an apprentice unless Jodie Foster discovers Magical talent.

  “Do you have in your possession or your keeping any Magically enhanced or sourced items?”

  “Not on Earth.”

  “Your next meeting will be on August 18. My secretary will bring you your monthly Permit. Outside.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Have a nice day.”

  By the frightened look in his eyes, I might as well have threatened his family with mass rape and torture.

  The wreck outside had stopped rocking. The PA squealed again. “Number fifty-nine.”

  “Me. That’s me. Gotta go, brother,” he said, limping through the door behind me. I sat down on the blessedly empty bench to wait.

  MY WOOLGATHERING was interrupted by the click-clack of high heels on the granite floor. The woman walking down the corridor was dressed in the characteristic brown striped suit of an Inquisitor. Absorbed in the iPad she held, she was unaware of my attention.

  As she passed by me, I caught a whiff of lightly applied Dior. One of the very, very few things in the world I am allergic to. I sneezed.

  Like a startled bird, she looked up. Time slowed as I watched her pupils dilate, her mouth open.

  A Feast of Souls. And she was reading me.

  Something metallic snapped the connectivity clean, and this close to a Nullmage, I dared not tell what.

  “Who are you?” she asked, stepping back and pulling out a pistol from under her jacket. A pistol! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Mage handle a gun before.

  “This is a nullmage-safe ballistic-range antihuman device,” she said.

  It took considerable effort not to start laughing.

  She must have sensed my irreverence, because she clicked the safety off with her thumb. Curiously enough, her heartbeat remained even, nor did I scent any sweat. Inquisitorial training must have improved in last few decades to enforce such an excellent level of autonomous control.

  “This is a nullmage-safe ballistic-range antihuman device,” she repeated. “It will tear you to shreds if you try anything. Raise your hands, slowly, and tell me who you are. Now.”

  Being a Feast is a tricky business, even more for an Inquisitor—did her superiors know they had a potential Necromancer in their ranks? Damn. I raised my hands slowly.

  “Calm down, ma’am,” I said. “Calm down and put the gun away. I don’t mean you any harm.”

  The ma’am seemed to do the trick because some of the tension bled away from her face.

  “Just like you said, ma-am,” I repeated, for good measure, “we’re in a Nullmage zone—I can’t hurt you.” Unless I rip open the continuum here, but let’s not get into that. “Just calm down, ma’am.”

  The pistol’s aim didn’t waver. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “I’m a temporary exile from the Sunless Planes, waiting for my permit. Sunless Planes,” I said. “We’re pacifists, ma’am.”

  Finally, she relaxed, and put the pistol away. “My apologies. You see all sorts here.”

  “Smell them too,” I said, thinking of the man who had been sitting beside me.

  She extended her hand to me. “Gen-Mai, Inquisitor-Captain, Gray.”

  “Mori Penn,” I said. “White.”

  “Sorry about the gun, Mr. Penn.”

  Inquisitors never change, though the technologies they apologize for might. “It happens. Let it be.”

  “Mori Penn?” she asked. “It’s not familiar. You’re not a Demonologist are you?”

  “No. Never touch that stuff.” Some instructions stay with a Mage, especially if they’re repeated enough times. “My mother, bless her crazy battered heart, extracted a promise out of me.”

  The Inquisitor looked puzzled. “What are your serials, Mori?”

  Lying to the Securitates Arcanarum is one of those oath-violating errors. I reeled off the seven digits.

  She looked down and started swiping at her iPad.

  A moment later, “You lied to me,” she said.

  “Bullshit,” I replied, smiling as hard as I could. “Giving you a nickname hardly constitutes a lie.”

  “No, you said ‘I can’t hurt you’—this is only a Class-3 nullmage.”

  “An error of omission? Perhaps I should have said ‘I can’t hurt you without being forsworn’?”

  “You should have.”

  “My apologies, Captain.”

  “Well then, have a nice day,” she said, turning back to her iPad and click-clacking away down the corridor.

  That was it? After pulling a gun on me? Goddamn Inquisitors.

  ANOTHER twenty minutes passed before Mr. Fueller’s secretary came down to see me.

  “Hiya, sweetie,” she said, “sorry for the wait. Mr. Fueller just sent down your approval.” Sweetie, again? The parole officer was obviously not in the habit of disclosing pertinent data to his administrative personnel.

  Gritting my teeth wouldn’t help. “Is the permit ready, ma’am?” I asked.

  “It certainly is,” she said, holding out another piece of plastic and a clipboard. There was a serial number on the card, followed by the Sigil of the SA. “Just sign here, and we’re all done.”

  Taking the pen she offered, I scrawled my name over the dotted line as my thumb sought out the embossed characters on the little plastic card. Mage, Independent. Restricted, White. For all the amusement the process merited, there were hounds baying somewhere deep inside me.

  THE inevitable lunchtime downtown traffic jam was well underway by the time I got out of the SA building.

  Keeping my eyes peeled for any marker of the now mostly forgotten Necromancer Resistance Movement, I began to walk toward home in a haphazard manner, choosing small side streets and alleys over the main thoroughfares of the city.

  Thirteen minutes later, in a small alley off John, I spotted a piece of graffiti—a black-and-white whiskered rat—perched on the edge between whitewashed cement and dull red brick. I paused for a moment, bent down, and scratched at the rat’s nose.

  Nothing.

  Sighing, I straightened.

  “Too early for this, boi,” said a voice behind me.

  I turned. “Best to have it out in the light,” I said. “Chasing the Dead, after dark, is a very bad thing for me to be doing right now.”

  “You goin’ yellow on me?”

  The fear throbbed so sometimes I would like as not be ready to foul my pants had the Symbiot not maintained my control for me. Samedi would know that. True possession kills a human host. Tragic, but at least the problem solves itself. For one of us….

  “I don’t think I should meet the Mapmaker, Baron. There’s an old argument there.” Face-saving truths.

  Samedi smiled, his teeth gleaming white. “It was you that said you wanted to clear your name. You still want?”

  Yes. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “I’ve got your back.”

  “Not my back I’m worried about.”

  “Hide or die. Same as it’s always been.”

  And when has a Necromancer feared mere death? I couldn’t look at him, staring instead at the cracked alley asphalt. “My courage has deserted me,” I whispered.

  “Told you it would,” said the Baron. “The day, boi, it comes to all of us. Just took a while gettin’ to you.”

  My eyes had closed of their own accord. “I’m sorry I was not more understanding, back then.”

  Samedi’s shrill laughter filled the alley. “Told you. Told you. Come. My turn to laugh and lead you out of the pit.”

  BY THE time we got to our destination, a small copy shop advertising 3¢ B&W prints with a valid student ID, the Symbiot regained control of my brain and the fear receded. Slightly.

  Inside, the smell of toner gave the air an acidic taste, even as the man behind the counter passed Samedi a key.

  “Come on, boi,” the Baron said.

  Ducking my head in greeting to the clerk, I followed Samedi through the shop, past the sealed boxes of copy paper stacked three deep against the walls, past the whirring machines, past the large banners extolling the virtues of Lexmark, and into a small back room filled with recycling bins, scraps of paper escaping their confines to litter the ground.

  A shadowed door was set into the far wall, the lintel near the door handle marked with black handprints. The Baron unlocked the door and threw it open to reveal a staircase leading upward.

  THE City’s dark places are not to be found where one might expect them—in cemeteries and old houses where the Dead are expected to live. The darkness gathers, instead, where the Dead had gone about the business of living when they were alive. A particular subway station. Intersections of busy streets that become suddenly quiet, restless, at a particular hour in the day. Little flats above shops.

  In this particular flat above the copy shop, a Mage had died in the midst of his obsession and kept the Desert away by sheer, obstinate compulsiveness.

  The Mapmaker, his true name hidden in the lines between countries and the forks of river tributaries, sat at an ink-stained table, carefully penning a label onto a large map of the city. He looked up as we entered, and despite the Symbiot, I shivered.

  “Prince Mordred,” said the Mapmaker, his dusty voice rasping with glee, “you’re looking for someone?”

  “I’m looking for a ghost,” I said, “that can make the world flicker.”

  The Mapmaker pointed to a small table off to one side, set with a piece of blank letter-sized paper and an empty McDonalds drink cup. Four markers—red, blue, yellow, green—sat point up in the cup.

  “Color me a shape, bastard,” said the Mapmaker, “so the colors don’t touch.”

  Wordless, I approached the table. The Baron was silent, watching me. I wet my index finger with my tongue and traced a circle in the center of the sheet of paper.

  The Mapmaker sniggered. But I knew what I was about. Taking up the first marker—yellow—I began to draw.

  “You’re not looking for the ghost that can make the world flicker,” the Mapmaker said as I finished coloring in the circle.

  Petals, next, alternating Red and Blue. Make them an even number. “So what am I looking for?” I asked.

  “Finish your doodle,” he said. “When you screw up, I’ll tell you to go screw yourself.”

  “It’s a daisy,” I said, then traced out the next layer of petals, in green and yellow. “Color it in yourself, it works. I’m tired of your game.”

  “So arrogant! Still!”

  “What am I looking for?”

  Without warning, the Mapmaker tossed me a small, twisted piece of paper. Instinctively, I grabbed it out of the air. The paper was a Mobius strip. An actual Mobius strip, not a paper folded and glued to resemble such. Its white surf— No, the surface was black. I turned the strip in my hands. White. Looking up, I met the Mapmaker’s rheumy eyes.

  “You’re not looking for the ghost than can make the world flicker,” he said, again. “You are looking for the ghost that can bend space and time.”

  The Mapmaker must have seen my sudden relief, because he chortled again.

  “Oh ho!” he said. “The Prince doubted himself. Figured it might just be in your head, eh? Would serve you right,” he muttered, looking down at his map again with customary ghostly bipolarism, “becoming a common murderer.”

  “Where do I find it?” I asked, ignoring his mutterings.

  “Where does the road take you?”

  “That’s not—”

  Samedi’s upraised hand stopped the words about to tumble out of my mouth, harsh and demanding.

  “We’re done here,” said the Baron.

  Gritting my teeth in frustration, I nodded. The Mapmaker had many answers to give, but “where the road takes you” was one of the better ones.

  AND so it was that Sunday night found me standing in a lineup outside the Unseelie Consulate, trying to keep the rain off my head with an upraised hand.

  “Remind me why I’m out with you when I have work tomorrow?” I asked Tom. Him, the rain simply avoided.

  “Because I called you,” he said, “and you said something about a road, and then you said ‘sure’?”

  “Rhetorical question,” I muttered. Then, louder, “is this line ever going to move? You’re a ruler of the House! Cut in!”

  Tom clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Patience, dear.”

  “And where’s Lady Natalia?” I asked.

  Tom’s eyes grew dark. “Dinner with family.”

  “That’s hardly a reason to pout,” I said. Stupid besotted Faerie. “By the way. Um. So there’s this guy at work. Well, not at work, per se, but—”

  “Here we go,” interrupted Tom. I looked up to notice the bouncer at the door gesturing to us.

  INSIDE, the party was… not exactly a party. A hushed silence lay over the warehouse, packed with what looked like the entirety of the Unseelie court. The owls in the rafters overhead were morbidly quiet; candles in tall crystal candelabra flickered in an unfelt breeze.

  “What the hell?” I muttered.

  “Outside,” said Tom, “you asked the wrong question. You should have asked why I called you.” He glided forward, the crowd parting before him, leaving me to follow as I could.

  “All right, I give,” I said, once I’d caught up to him just before he reached the obsidian desk. “Why did you call me?”

  Tom turned to me and smiled. “The Mirror Mage is in town. Guess who bought you an answer?”

  I groaned. “Tom, we’ve been through this before. The Mirror Mage has no answers for—”

  “Your Excellency, Your Highness, he’ll see you first,” said a quiet voice from somewhere behind me. I turned to see a willow-wound pixie, its eyes glittering a pale pink, smiling anxiously up at us.

  “Go on, dearie,” said Tom, then grabbed me by the elbow. “We’re right behind you.”

  THE usual theatrics—Magical lights, harp-playing crickets, invisible waterfalls quite unwelcome after being rained on outside, thank you—were in play the moment we crossed out of the main hall and into a small antechamber.

  “Goddamn Visionaries,” I muttered. They made a very, very comfortable living off their erratic and fragmented visions while giving the rest of Magedom a bad name. “Tom, he’s not reliable. None of them are.”

  “On the contrary!” boomed a voice from all around us. “I have proven my worth to the greatest of Kings and Queens! But I wouldn’t expect an Adept to grant that a lowly Visionary can see things they cannot.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I’ve bought questions,” said Tom, advancing into the room.

  “You’ve wasted your money,” I muttered, as a bright spotlight in the ceiling came on. It illuminated a large, full-length, gilded, gem-encrusted mirror standing in the middle of the floor.

  “Ask!” said the Mirror-Mage, his overlarge face appearing in the mirror, wreathed in smoke.

  “My cousin here,” said Tom, giving me a half-lidded glare, “must have a doom. Where is she? He? It? They?”

  Good gods, he never, ever gives up. Be grateful that someone still cares enough about your wretched heart.

  “Temporality undetermined,” said the Mirror.

  Of course.

  “Temporality really undetermined,” said the Mirror. “But why are you asking me? He’s already met his doom.”

  That drew me, despite myself. “When? Where?”

  “Aha! So now my answers are useful?” the Mirror asked.

  “Obviously not,” I said, and turned to leave. “The only thing that keeps you in business is your deliberate vagueness.”

  “A voice out of the darkness,” said the Mirror.

  “Cousin, let’s go,” I cast over my shoulder as I started to walk out of the room.

  “Speaking in codes,” the Mirror said.

  My steps faltered.

  “You know what he’s talking about?” asked Tom, peering quizzically at the mirror.

  “No,” I said. “No, I don’t.”

  I’ve never met Alan. Per se.

  MY CELLPHONE rang at 13:29.

  “Hello?”

  “This is an automated reminder from Petra Exile Services. Thank you for choosing Petra Enterprises for all your Relocation needs. Payments on your account are now overdue. If you have already made—”

  Two more days and my first paycheck would be in my possession. Then I could throw half of it at Petra, and make the incessant phone calls stop.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE

  “I’M SORRY, sir, the card didn’t go through.”

  “Could you run it again?”

  “Um… it says insufficient funds. I can try, though.”

  An uncomfortable start to a Monday morning. Especially a Monday morning when my first paycheck was supposed to have been deposited into my account.

  “No, that’s fine. Sorry.”

  Walking away empty-handed from my pilgrimage to Starbucks, I sought out my bank’s closest ATM.

  Balance: $2.07

  Ramasundarm had reassured me that the deposit would be processed at midnight on Sunday. Perhaps he meant the midnight after Sunday? I jogged the rest of the way to work.

  THE door buzzed, and I stepped into EK, only to confront fourteen pairs of eyes staring at me in hungry expectation.

  “… new guy,” muttered a Basement Dweller, and everyone relaxed. These people looked like they, too, were missing a paycheck. Maybe Ramasundarm just forgot?

  “Mori!” called Justin, pushing through the Basement Dwellers toward me. “Did you get paid?”